WorldBox — A Brief Overview
Welcome to the first in a series of posts which will expand and explore the various elements of the WorldBox project, from its development partners and production kickstarter platform, to its long terms goal of creating an AI driven interactive story generator.
In the beginning…
In its infancy, before it even had a name, WorldBox was conceived as a way to serve interactive music videos. The concept was to have music videos premiere with an interactive functionality provided through web connected consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox. Akin to rhythm based games such as Guitar Hero, viewers, in competition with each other, would tap out rhythm sequences as a music video progressed, with the more successful viewers opening up unique variations within a video.
However, as MTV started to replace music video content with shows about spoilt and pregnant teenagers, the concept was put on a back burner.
A few years later elements of the music video concept were revived as part of a much grander scheme of creating live interactive stage productions with narratives that evolved organically through audience input.
The core of this was a complex mechanical stage system which could serve up highly detailed set pieces, complete with live character actors and projected backgrounds, transporting the audience to any number of locations. With literally hundreds of thousands of scene combinations possible from a library of only 20 scenes, each episode would be unique and run like a game of Dungeons & Dragons, a games master providing the general layout of the show from behind the scenes, with the audience input deciding the direction.
The WorldBox film production system was fully formed through this development, with the current iteration being part of the logical progression of automating as much of the narrative and visual elements as possible, with the end goal of having a fully autonomous system capable of providing unique content, on demand, on a per viewer basis.
Having this automation process always in the forefront of our minds, especially in terms of how we would eventually automate the storytelling aspects, led to one our biggest lightbulb moments: structuring the massive amount of viewer interaction (data) flowing through the system as a way to train an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to start generating it one unique narratives.
Simply put, an ANN is fed data which travels through a network of decision making nodes. This yields various results depending on the route the data travels through these nodes. Most of these results are nonsensical but by selecting the few which are relevant, and reinforcing the paths they traveled through the network, the system is slowly trained to create better and better results.
WorldBox viewers would be rewarded for providing the backpropagation (i.e. selecting desirable results) within the system, a process which is extremely time intensive and (usually) very expensive. This input will also provide detailed, region specific narrative maps on how different groups around the world prefer to see a story develop, as well as dozens of other important narrative metrics which will allow us to fine tune experiences for each viewer.
We are under no illusions of creating this ANN ourselves, so, as we will be doing with the 3D game engine and VR elements, we will stand on the shoulders of industry giants, borrowing the best tech in each respective field and leveraging the unique position WorldBox will hold within the market to push the potential of these technologies to their maximum. For example GPT-3 from OpenAI is looking extremely promising in terms of a language model, as is Unreal Engine 5 for photoreal, real-time rendering of characters and environments.
In a nutshell, WorldBox is striving to be the first platform to bridge the freedom of modern Role Playing Games (RPGs) with the grandeur of film and television characters, narratives and locations.
The blockchain aspects of the project are one of the newer additions and were the result of looking for ways to drive user engagement as well as independently finance productions on the system, thus retaining the creative freedom which is so often lost through traditional financing structures which are beholden to investors who may not always be creatively aligned with the vision of a project.
However, the more we explored the integration of decentralized finance, the more applications became apparent which would provide massive utility and long term value.
More than that, we realized we could create something truly unique in terms of the tokenomics: a token which was immune to price manipulation, had desirable utility and that would constantly increase in value (in relation to the price of the US $).
These tokenomics and associated facets of the project, such as our independent production launch pad and Utility NFTS, will be covered in much finer detail in the upcoming blogs.
So who are the people behind WorldBox?
First and foremost is Jono Heaney, the founder and chief architect of the project. Born to well known theater and television director Bobby Heaney in Johannesburg in the early 80s, Jono trained as an animator and has been running post production company, Suspended Animation in Cape Town since 2002, working primarily in Television and advertising.
Amongst other pursuits he designed and received a provisional patent (UK and USA) for a shock absorbing drone frame which he marketed along with his other racing drone designs under the banner of his drone company CrashBox Drones.
Following a lifelong passion for aviation he also trained as a commercial helicopter pilot but unfortunately lost his medical due to an eye condition brought on by 20 years of excessive screen time associated with animation work.
Suspended Animation is part of FilmHub.Africa, a media company collective which will be facilitating the production side of the WorldBox project.
The other long running companies in this collective are: 9mm Films, a highly versatile production company run by Peter Heaney (Jono’s older brother), and One Nation Studios, a sound design powerhouse run by Greg Canning, a close family friend of more than 20 years.
Touch Foundry, the app and blockchain code wizards on the project, is run by Fabio Longano, an industry veteran and long time friend and colleague.
Each of these companies is successful in their own right and we encourage you to have a look at their respective websites.
Last but definitely not least is Bepro.network an award winning blockchain development company based in Portugal who have awarded WorldBox with a substantial grant to develop the blockchain element of the system on their base code. This comes with extensive support and mentorship within the crypto space. https://www.bepro.network/
Thanks for reading! And please subscribe so you don’t miss our upcoming blogs in which we will be exploring each element of WorldBox project in detail.
